Daughter loves Dippin' Dots more than double plays

My daughter, Mackenzie, and I will be going to our third Major League Baseball game together this spring when we travel with co-worker Jim Martin and his daughter to see the Pittsburgh Pirates.

I love baseball. My first professional game was when my dad took me to see the Jamestown Expos play in the New York-Penn League almost 40 years ago. I spent part of the game wondering how the Jamestown players were able to steal their uniforms from the Montreal Expos.

Later that year, my dad took me to Three Rivers Stadium to see the Pirates play my beloved New York Mets.

I was bummed at first because my favorite player, Tom Seaver, wasn't pitching that night. But I did get to see fellow lefty Jon Matlack blank the Bucs, 6-0.

After the game, I sang Matlack's praises quite loudly as we walked down a seemingly never-ending ramp to get out of the stadium. I didn't notice the glares dozens of steelworkers gave me and my dad as we exited.

It was my first, and best, memory of about 20 trips to Three Rivers Stadium before it was torn down in 2000.

(Second-best memory: the Monsters of Rock concert in June 1988 with Van "Hagar" Halen, the Scorpions and some new band named Metallica. You might have heard of them.)

Mackenzie, who is almost 7, doesn't have the same memories from her trips to PNC Park. I asked her the other day what she remembers from our visit to Pittsburgh last summer with Jim and his daughter.

"It was sunny. Hot," Mackenzie said.

Accurate enough. The game-time temperature was 90 degrees, and the sun shined directly on our beet-red faces for the first several innings.

What did you like best about the game?

"Dippin' Dots," she said, referring to those frozen peas of ice cream that taste like wax-covered ice pellets but are irresistible to Mackenzie and most kids under 10.

Anything else?

"There were souvenirs. And a playground," Mackenzie said. "That's it."

What do you remember about the game?

"Well, that was boring," she said. "You just had to sit there and eat peanuts."

God forbid that you have to sit at a ballpark, eat peanuts and watch a baseball game.

But then I'm not a 61/2-year-old girl, though my wife tells me that I sometimes act like one.

Maybe I can convince the Pirates to wear tiaras when we go to the game. And give out Dippin' Dots.